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Thursday, February 28, 2013

[Concepts] Consensual Democracy

Let us not be fooled: it is not because we vote - every four years or every five - we live in a democracy. In
fact, this perception is to generalize and explain the high (and
increasing) levels of abstention that today are recorded in almost all
over the globe.The vote is not democracy at all ... especially when it is so conditioned in time, impact and effectiveness as in the current model of representative democracy. But a model of participatory democracy voting is really the basis of democracy: frequent, influential and informed. Building on that consensus-building - says the "conventional wisdom" - are utopian or impossible to achieve in large groups. But
not just that: Consensual Democracy (one of the aspects of
Participatory Democracy) is possible, provided that certain methods and
procedures followed. One
such method is to present the subject to a vote and soon after,
requires an indicative vote, even before the moment of debate in order
to identify how many people line up for and against. From
here it is possible to target the meeting and discuss these two groups
from two positions and not a multitude of individual positions, as
typically occurs in a debate. The
two groups choose among themselves a representative who can hit after
another with a common position between both consensual and that after
the final vote is taken.On
the issue of decision-making in meetings of participatory democracy is
particularly interesting to follow the example of the Occupy movement in
the U.S.: in this group, the methods are implemented Consensual
Democracy from proposals that are outlined by individual groups of
activists Occupy and then agreed Higher counties where these local groups are federated. From this level of decision option shall be followed throughout the movement.It should be borne in mind that we are all conditioned to believe that these methods are "utopian" and "unrealistic". That's
right we were papagueado to exhaustion by very organized and
well-funded agents partidocracia and tell us that all forms of Direct
Democracy is slow, inefficient and chaotic. But these examples prove that the system works and nothing prevents be adopted on a larger scale and in greater depth.Source:http://tradeonion.wordpress.com/tag/direct-democracy/